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Marsh Prause, a long-time leader in the Westerwood neighborhood, says the city has made amends, to some extent, for a design eyesore created many years ago in the neighborhood.

To connect Westerwood to Smith Street and Battleground Avenue, two feeder streets taking traffic in and out of downtown, the city extended Hill Street across those two streets to North Mendenhall. The latter is one of Westerwood's key streets.

The extension meant the removal of three quaint bungalows that faced North Mendenhall. The four-lane connector created a wide gap along Mendenhall and amounted to what Prause calls an "asphalt jungle."

Now, he says, the city has narrowed the pavement by building a median in the center of the connector from Smith to Mendenhall.

The new median, once landscaped, which Prause says the Westerwood Neighborhood Association will pay for, "should restore some of the area's aesthetics and help to slow traffic on North Mendenhall."

Prause's e-mail was in a response to a story Friday about the city's reembracing roundabouts to keep traffic flowing. The city had abandoned most traffic circles in the 1940s, with the exception of one at East Lake and Garland drives in Westerwood.

Prause says Westerwood is proud of its roundabout and plans to put neighborhood sign near it soon.

The roundabout story also brought a response from Janette Wright, who grew up in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, where roundabouts are common.

She said the circles make "so much sense to me and was I surprised that here in the states you didn't see them ... In Amsterdam ... they seem to be changing regular crossroads to roundabouts all the time."

A reader of the Rhino Times called the roundabout under construction in the Lake Jeanette community "the circle of death," but Wright says roundabouts shouldn't be feared.

"As long as you know the traffic on the roundabout has the right of way, it is a no-brainer to use them. Even big trucks and buses go with ease around that little circle. They even have roundabouts with three lanes in the Netherlands. It works."

Greensboro's two new roundabouts,in Lake Jeanette and at Greene and McGee streets downtown, are only one wide lane.

"I am glad to see them make a come back here," Wright continues, "and hope they will eventually get rid of four-way stops where nobody seems to know what they are doing."

Alumni of former Immanuel Lutheran Collge, which was located on a small campus on East Market Street until it closed in 1961, now at least have a reminder of where their alma mater stood.

According to the Aggie Report, published by N.C. A&T State University, a monument to the school was unveiled recently on the portion of A&T's campus that Immanuel Lutheran occupied.

Lutheran was founded in 1903 in Concord for black students by white German Lutherans. The school moved to Greensboro in 1905, where a large granite main building was built. The school operated a high school, junior college and seminary.

The stone main building was torn down shortly after the college closed. But one of its last-built buildings, a combination gymnasium and dormitory, survived until 2005 and was used by A&T.

The monument reads: "A unique private insitution that trained teachers and religious leaders for the black community. The school....was under the jurisdiction of the Luthern Church Synod."

The stone displays an engraving of the main building and lists the former presidents, starting with Niles Bakke, considered the school's founder, and ending with the Rev. William H. Kampschmidt.

A story appeared June 5 how Sheriff Andy Taylor and Aunt Bee on "The Andy Griffith Show" may have been named for a Greensboro couple, Bill and Lydia (Buzz) Taylor, brought several emails and calls came about another Griffith link to Greensboro.

Remember the recording started Griffith on the road to the big time, "What It Was with Football"?

In the 1953 monologue, Griffith tells how he wondered through the woods and came upon a stadium (had to be Kenan at Chapel Hill) that he called a cow pasture. He said convicts in striped shirts ran up and down the field watching men hit each other and throw each other to the ground. Police stood by and watched the mayhem and did nothing, he said. And at one point, Griffith said, "I spilled my big orange drink,'' Griffith said.

Bob Anderson, retired from Jefferson-Pilot Corp. (now Lincoln National), says Griffith, a Mt. Airy native and 1949 UNC grad, recorded the monologue before an audience at the old Jefferson Standard Employees Club.

The club, with a rustic clubhouse, stood until a few years ago stood on 400 plus acres on New Garden Road. The land has since been developed.

Anderson says Griffith came out and did a funny monologe about "Roman & Julliet," followed by "What It Was Was Football."

"All the laughter you hear came from Jefferson Standard employees," Young says.

There is some thinking the recording became vinyl in a studio in the basement of the old Harvey West Music Store. The store at the time stood at West Market Street and Commerce Place downtown.

If anyone has any knowledge of a Harvey West connection to the "What It Was...." let's hear from you.

Memories of the man some consider Greensboro's most innovative architect are being kept alive by his friends, admirers and daughter, Jane Levy.

As a result of a symposium last November on Edward Loewenstein and money raised from donations and a public tour of eight modernistic houses he designed, $10,000 went toward establishing a graduate scholarship in his name at UNCG.

"We anticipate that over the long term this will grow to truly be yet another legacy of Loewenstein," Dabney Sanders, a consultant on the tour and symposium, says in an email.

But much more money is needed. The scholoarship needs an endowment of $50,000 to draw sufficient income from.

Sanders says she and Jane Levy will attempt to raise $20,000 of the needed money through a raffle. The winner will get a five course dinner, with a generous wine selection, for 12 people.

The dinner will be held on the lawn of Jane Levy's house, which was designed and lived in by her father until his death in 1970. The house is at Granville Road and West Cornwallis Drive.

The exact spot will be around the Nancy Rubins Airplane sculpture that Jane Levy and her husband, Richard Levy, bought last year for their front yard. Rubins, a California sculptor, creates works using parts from discarded airplane parts.

Tickets for the raffle cost $100, and only 200 will be sold, with the deadline for buying June 20. Sanders said some groups are pooling their money and buying one ticket as a group.

The date for the dinner hasn't been set, "but the it will be held at a time mutually agreed upon by the winner and the committee," Sanders says.

The affair is being called "An Artful Feast Under the Stars." Postcards sent to potential ticket buyers advertise "great odds, great chefs, great cause."

The scholarship will go to a student in the graduate interior architect program at UNCG. Loewenstein, a graduate of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, stayed busy designing modernist homes and buildings in Greensboro and elsewhere but found time to teach a course at UNCG.

Not everyone was a fan of the man's modern designs. At least three home he designed in Irving Park have been demolished.But many remain and their owners swear by them, not at them.

During a stretch from 1961 to 1965, Loewenstein's staff included Gregory Ivy, who founded the art department at UNCG in 1935> After a dispute with the univeristy over space for the art department, Ivy left to join Loewenstein.

Ivy, a painter who is considered the father of modernistic style art in North Carolina, did interior and exterior work for the Loewenstein firm.

Ironically, the firm operated not from some out-of-this-world creation, but an old-style Georgia mansion that still survives off Summit Avenue. The remnants of the Loewenstein firm, Wilson Engineering, remain in the house.

The house,where Eleanor Roosevelt once stayed, originally belonged to Julius Cone. Jane Levy's grandmother was Julius Cone's wife.

One Loewestine and Ivy colloborations will soon become one of downtown's most important buildings again: the new Elon University School of Law.

Loewenstein designed the building as the main Greensboro Public Library in 1964. Ivy did the artistic reliefs that remain on the walls outside the entrance at North Greene Street and West Friendly Avenue.

For further imformation about the raffle, telephone Dabney Sanders at 379-0821 or email her at dsanders@actiongreeensboro.org or www.actiongreensboro.org

John Kincaid Sr., who lives in Reidsville but grew up in the Proximity mill village here, writes that a recent story about the future of the former Pet Dairy building on Summit Avenue, brought back delicious memories dating to 1931.

He remembers the Spur Gas Station across the street (still there as a used car lot)and of the incline (still there) that started at the railroad underpass and passed the diary building.

He recalls the street car tracks from downtown to the White Oak mill village passed through the underpass and climbed the hill.

"In winter when ice covered the road only the electric street car could manage the incline," he says.

Many people can remember when Pet Dairy operated the Summit plant, but fee can know that the the company once operated a dairy bar there. Kincaid remembers.

"Almost every Sunday - spring, summer and autumn - after Sunday school and church a group of us boys, no girls every with us, would hike to Pet Dairy for a chocolate milk shake, cold and thick, for a dime.

"This addiction has followed me for the past seventy-four years. I'm now 87 and the old urge for chocolate milk shakes is just as strong as ever, even though they cost $1.75.

WFMY-TV's first locally-produced program high-definition television show in the Piedmont area will feature a patriotic theme during a patriotic part of the year, the eve of July 4.

The show will be a 30-minute documentary, "The Battle of Guilford Courthouse," and will air Monday at 8 p.m.

The catch is viewers must have a high-definition TV to watch in high-definition, which produces a superior image to conventional TV. h . Those with high-definition sets can tune to WFMY-HD channel 2-1 or Time Warner Cable Digital Cable Channel 521.

The Battle of Guilford Courthouse was fought March 15, 1781, over a 1,000-acre battlefield, parts of are now included in Guilford Courthouse National Military Park in northwest Greensboro.

The battle helped make it possible for Americans to celebrate July 4th. Historians call the fight at Guilford Courthouse between Americans under Gen. Nathanael Greene and the British under Gen. Lord Charles Cornwallis a watershed event in the American Revolution.

Never mind the Americans technically lost. In so doing, they bloodied the British so badly, the Red Coats ceased being an effective fighting force. Cornwallis surrendered the British Army six months at Yorktown, Va.

America had won its independence.

A Channel 2 news release says the show utilized the expertise of John Durham, the military park's historian. Viewers will learn about efforts in late 19th century by Judge David Schenck to save as much of the battlefield as possible.

By then,100 years had passed somce the battle. The unmarked battlefield was so obscure most people in the Greensboro area couldn't have found it if they had tried.

The show - produced, photographed and edited by News 2 producer Geoff Johnson and sponsored by Time Warner and the North Carolina National Guard - will discuss modern-day efforts to add battlefield land to the park. The expansion effort is a joint venture of the Guilford Battleground Co., which Schenck founded more than a 100 years ago, and the National Park Service.

The show will include scenes from Guilford Courthouse battle re-enactments and interviews with re-enactors who come from far away places to participate each March.